Books of The Times; In the Words of the Victims: The Suffering Nazis Caused

By Herbert Mitgang

Published: February 17, 1990

Lodz Ghetto

Inside a Community Under Siege

Compiled and edited by Alan Edelson and Robert Lapides

Illustrated. 526 pages. Viking. $29.95.

A Child's War

World War II Through the Eyes of Children

By Kati David

210 pages. Four Walls Eight Windows. $17.95.

''Lodz Ghetto'' documents in fact what John Hersey's novel ''The Wall'' did so imaginatively in fiction about the Warsaw ghetto 40 years ago. Both Polish ghettos, which had large Jewish populations and traditions of learning, were occupied by Germany during World War II and were transformed into way stations on the road to Auschwitz.

In his novel, Mr. Hersey invented a buried archive of notebooks to allow him greater latitude in describing ghetto life and resistance to the Germans. The co-editors of ''Lodz Ghetto'' - Alan Edelson, a writer and producer of a documentary film of the same title, and Robert Lapides, a professor of English at the City University of New York and the founding editor of Hudson River magazine - have unearthed the actual testimony of ghetto witnesses. What they write is more heartbreaking than any literary invention.

Even while they were subjected to humiliations and killings by the Germans, some men and women in the Lodz ghetto wrote down what was happening so those who survived could tell the world of the slaughter of the innocents. Otherwise, who could believe what took place? Here, in 18 diaries and monographs, the ghetto writers seek attention and understanding, often in religious tones. They personify the meaning of the phrase People of the Book.

In 1944, in the last months of the Lodz ghetto's existence, a young man, aware that he and his young sister faced death, began a diary in the margins of a French novel. To insure that his words would somehow be understood and saved, he wrote in four languages: Polish, English, Yiddish and Hebrew. He railed at ''the devouring Nazi beast'' and prayed the ghetto would be saved ''at the last minute.'' His book was found at Auschwitz.

Of 200,000 Jews in the Lodz ghetto, perhaps 10,000 survived. Some had the good fortune to be sent to work camps. One man who perished at Auschwitz, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, is the most controversial figure in the book. He was appointed ''Eldest of the Jews'' by the Nazis and did their bidding, sacrificing the old, the sick and children under 10 years of age to meet deportation quotas. For suppressing dissent and strikes with the use of a Jewish police force, he was held in contempt by many Jews. But Rumkowski believed that he was saving lives, that he could trust the Germans to save at least some of the Jews who worked at trades that supplied the war effort.

At the end of this powerful book, Mr. Adelson raises a hypothetical question: ''If it had not been for Rumkowski's deceitful or misinformed assurances of their safety, and his constant restraint of those truth-telling 'rumor mongerers' who warned of the Nazi genocide, would so many of those people have willingly boarded the trains?'' The answer will never be known. But ''Lodz Ghetto,'' with its remarkable photographs from inside the ghetto, including some in color, provides added documentation that damns revisionist historians who still dispute the facts of the ''final solution.''

''A Child's War'' is a rare and poignant account of World War II as witnessed through the eyes of 15 children of different faiths and countries. The eight women and seven men who tell stories of their childhood speak across both sides of the battle lines. The enemy is war itself: fear, hunger, separation, death in the family.

The witnesses include Fiorella, who remembers with pride her father who, while in the Resistance in northern Italy, was betrayed and tortured and who died fighting. Inge's father, in the German Army, sends her a doll decorated with a swastika; when she moves to the east to escape Allied bombing, her mother is raped by Russian soldiers and, after the war, her parents despise each other. Yuri, whose father is in the battle to save Leningrad, is constantly hungry; after the war, he and some of his schoolmates are punished for sharing food with starving German prisoners of war.

Robin learns to live in shelters when the Luftwaffe bombs England. In France, Claire watches as the Germans enter Paris. Looking back today, Claire says: ''With my mother being Jewish and my father working in the Resistance, printing an underground paper (the Communist paper Humanite), they had to take terrible risks. But instead of acknowledging the stress under which they lived, I did silly things to attract their attention.''

These stories have been assembled by Kati David, a journalist of Jewish Hungarian descent who was born in Amsterdam in 1935 and who witnessed the brand of the yellow star. Her father was deported and her mother interrogated by the Gestapo; luckily, both survived. In addition to the wartime stories, the author satisfies our curiosity by describing what happened to these children in their adult lives. ''A Child's War'' is a small education in itself, a book that could well be read by young people to discover the sorrows instead of the glories of war.Pearsond(Viking)